Fiction
Orbital
This one tells the story of a team of 5 austronauts in their space mission. It is less than a 100 pages long, but it is one of those books that requires your full attention, where every sentence and every word counts. It is beautifully written.
Stormlight Archives 5: Wind and Truth
Brandon Sanderson never dissapoints. Like all of Stormlight Archives, the longer the book the better because you never want it to end. Such an epic saga and such an epic book, can’t wait to see what comes next.
Augustus
I don’t think I was in the right mindset for this one. It is written in epistolary format (through letters) and it tells the life of Augustus, as historical fiction. Not really the kind of book that gets you engaged at any point in time.
Good to learn a bit about the roman times, but I have to say it is not even close to John William’s Stoner or Butcher’s Crossing. I’m just sad he did not write more novels. I’d probably not recommend this one to anyone unless they were into historical fiction.
Brandon Sanderson is my go to author when I need something easy to read that I know I will get fully immersed in the story. The book begins with the premise of the once mighty Elantrian people, now cursed with being alive but with dead bodies, where none of their injuries ever heal. From this book you can expect the classic epicness that Brandon brings to all his books. With this one finished I’m only one or two books down to be up to date with all the books from the cosmere universe!
Love in Times of Colera
This is one of the classics I’d been craving for a while. I love how Marquez writes the whole story continously, jumping from one story to another without any logical stops or chapters, and yet it feels so natural and flows really well. It tells a strange love story of two characters, going from children to old age. This is one of those books where it just tells a story but nothing really happens, it just tells you the life of some people. But it is so well written that it is worth a read.
THis is the only book by Marquez that I’ve read, and I was hoping to get some of the magical realism he is famous for, but there was not much of it here. Seems like I’m going to have to read another of his books.
Another Country
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Travel
A Journey for Madmen
This book came to me in the form of a christmas present, and I have to say what a great gift! The book set in the 1960’s and it tells the real story about a group sailors that sail their boats solo and non-stop around the world. The story is really well written, and such an inspiration to go do more exciting adventures in life. Some of the characters in the book were around the same age I am right now, and it makes me wonder where I went wrong to end up in an office job instead of sailing around the world.
I have no idea of sailing, and have never set foot on a sailboat in my life, but after reading this book all I want to do is to buy a boat and sail across the world.
Technical
Designing Data Intensive Applications
I’ve never read this one back to back, instead I only peak at the section that interests me the most. This is such a good book to understand distributed systems. The nice thing about this one is that you can read the same section multiple times in your career, and every time you learn something new that you did not pick up on the time before, probably from lack of exposure or experience. Highly recommend!
Writing for Developers
This one was great to push me to start writing blogs online. It gives some practical advise on how to write good technical blogs, with some examples along the way. If nothing else, I would recommend this to anyone who is undecided about blogging. At first you have the fear of writing something that is wrong, and publishing it online where everyone can see how stupid you are.
The reality is that a lot of people will appreciate the insights into the topics you write about, even if you are not an expert on the subject. That fear of writing something stupid quickly goes away, and what you are left with is the joy of learning by writing.